Enterprises bringing data back in-house for more flexibility, shows study

As big data becomes a reality, European enterprises are improving their internal
datacentres and storing data in-house rather than on the external cloud to have more control over
their business information, according to Oracle's Next Generation Datacentre Index
survey.

The study, conducted by datacentre analyst firm Quocirca, found that the number
ofrespondents using only in-house datacentre
facilities has risen from 45% in the last survey to 66% now.

More on datacentre consolidation

Meanwhile, the proportion of businesses with a mix of in-house and external
facilities dropped from 56% to 34%.

When businesses were caught off-guard by the big data
explosion last year, they started looking at cloud computing
and third-party datacentres. But as they began feeling the importance of data ownership and the
ability to move the data workloads from one system to
another easily, they started investing in their in-house facilities, said John Abel, EMEA hardware
engineered systems product leaderat Oracle.

The percentage of organisations saying they will need a new datacentre in the next 12 months
also increased from 22% to 26% suggesting businesses do not foresee an end to the current data
boom, but want to be in full control of their data.

Big data bounce

Last year’sNext Generation Datacentre Index showed that the use of
external, third-party datacentres had risen as businesses were taken by surprise by big data
trends.

The “big data bounce” highlights the increased value of data and the importance for businesses
to be able to move data between public and private cloud as easily as possible, the analyst firm
added.

The last survey was carried out at a time when businesses were considering cloud computing for
development, test and piloting, said Clive Longbottom, datacentre analyst at Quocirca.

“This study has been carried when cloud is becoming more mainstream, and many of the pilots are
now becoming full run-time projects," Longbottom said. "It seems that many of these have been
brought back in-house onto private cloud
platforms – and that this has resulted in a rationalisation of facility usage."

“However, many decisions around the datacentre are being made tactically – and this could impact
the more strategic capabilities of the owning organisation in the longer term.”

The countries which are most advanced in their datacentre investments are the
Nordics, the DCH region (Germany) and the UK.

TheEMEA organisations slightly increased the sophistication of their use of datacentres
between last year’s and this year’s study. The overall index score rose by 1% across the
region.

The study’s country-specific findings revealed that theUK has moved up one place since
last year to become third overall in the Next Generation Datacentre Index, with improvements
across the three indices – sustainability, flexibility and supportability.

Sustainability shows most improvement

The biggest area of improvement for the UK was sustainability as organisations with
sustainability action-plan increased from 47% to 68%.

Use of virtualisation in the datacentre has also increased, with over half of UK organisations
reporting virtualisation levels of above 50%.

UK businesses are employing virtualisation and server consolidation and are standardising their
in-house datacentres to closely align business and IT functions and gain a competitive advantage,
said Oracle's John Abel.

“The avalanche of data which forced many to look outside their four walls for
support last year is only going to continue. As such it makes sense that many organisations have
used the intervening year to get their houses in order and bring their data closer to the
organisation,” said Luigi Freguia, senior vice-president, Oracle Systems EMEA.

“It is also encouraging to see that organisations have future-proofed their
datacentre facilities, with improvements in server utilisation levels and greater use of
virtualisation,” Freguia said.

The study was conducted inOctober 2012 and Quocirca surveyed 952 managers
in large organisations across 10 countries in EMEA.

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